Cisco MediaSense, Release 8.5(3)

Up to 60 terabytes of media storage is supported per cluster, divided into up to six 2TB virtual disks in each of five servers. This assumes that all nodes are B-series servers, for which Cisco MediaSense supports SAN storage. C-series servers, for which only direct attached drives are currently supported, are limited to two 2TB media storage partitions each. Also, no single media partition may be smaller than 200GB.

Cisco MediaSense, Release 8.5(4)

In addition to approved UCS servers, Cisco MediaSense 8.5(4) can also be installed on a Services Ready Engine (SRE) module inside a router. An SRE module is a router blade that has its own processors, storage, network interfaces, and memory. Support for SRE requires SRE v2.0 software. For more information about approved SRE models, see the Solution Reference Network Design for Cisco MediaSense, Release 8.5(4).

Cisco MediaSense, Release 9.0(1)

Specification-based Virtualization enables Cisco MediaSense to run on Cisco Unified Computing System (Unified CS) servers that are also running other virtual machines. Specification-based Virtualization also enables Cisco MediaSense to run on select HP servers (Note that IBM servers are currently not supported.)

A new Open Virtualization Archive Virtual Machine (OVA-VM) template enables Cisco MediaSense to simplify the deployment of virtual machines in new installations. This template has deployment options for Services Ready Engines, primary servers, secondary servers, and expansion servers.

Cisco MediaSense-Specific Information for OVA Templates

If your partitions (VM disk configuration) are not aligned, your data replication between the primary and secondary servers may get congested and result in your data being out of sync. To avoid these problems, only use the VM templates provided by Cisco MediaSense.

Configure the primary server and secondary server in your Cisco MediaSense deployment to have identical hardware in terms of CPU configuration (number of CPUs and speed of the CPU), storage configuration (number of disks, speed of disk, and RAID setup), and memory. Be sure to keep both servers in the same network and run the same version of VMWare Hypervisor on both servers.

Cisco MediaSense-Specific Information for Sizing Guidelines

The VM-specific sizing informaton required for Cisco MediaSense is additional virtual disks for media storage. See the SRND for Cisco MediaSense for further information.